cursive is a getting to me a MORE interesting skill, since fewer people can do it. I am rooting for its decline so that I will be one of the few who can still pull it off. Unless you have a capitol ‘S’ in your name.

This year it has been taken off all school curriculum. It needs to be replaced with 10 finger keyboarding skills since 1) all students will be required to test via a computer of some sort, and 2) most students already computer literate type with one finger/stylus or with their thumbs only.

Cursive’s dying? Can someone please the headteacher of my niece and nephew’s primary school? She’s just started forcing it on all the children! (I agree with the typing skills being far more important these days.)

I’m guessing this teacher is also trying to outlaw dancing within city limits. You give your niece and nephew some glitter and tell them to slide into class tomorrow, throw it in the air, and shout: “Let’s dance!” Then they should dance their fool heads off until the principal is called in.

It’s probably a good thing that I never had children, because I would probably follow this advice. It would be interesting to watch the principal’s face as I told him, “But an online cartoonist told me to have my child do that!”

To me, cursive is only useful in signatures since it’s harder to forge.

It annoys me to no end that, in earlier grades, we were taught cursive because they believed nothing else would be accepted in college. Now we’re in college and they want everything typed in Times New Roman.

My cursive signature was so illegible that it was often questioned, and I started scrawling in print instead. It’s still illegible, but nobody cares anymore, especially on those electronic credit-card boxes.

But if you want to sign something with a flourish, it has to be in cursive!

In Finland we learn a completely different type of cursive that looks nothing like what those Q or Z in the last panel look like…

The cursive they teach us is mostly recognazible to those who don’t know it as it resembles “normal” writing a lot. The biggest difference with it is the letter s, which looks like a Moomin character’s head.

I was forced to learn cursive in elementary school, and some day just thought “what the hell is this?” and just stopped, and at that point, nobody ever cared or complained. Most people I know don’t use it either. (Well, I do have one friend who uses it.)

Adam, you do realise dozens of people will wish you a “fludy bortsnip” on your next birthday?

There were two subjects in elementary thatI refused to believe would ever be necessary for me to know: Cursive and the Metric system.

While it seems I was right on both counts (given that I’m not a STEM student), I do recant my earlier refusal to learn metric, since I do think that it should just become the world’s primary measurement system everywhere (as opposed to everywhere but for a handful-ish of countries).

I CAN write quite legibly in cursive (born in the late 50s), but don’t. No one can read it except old goats like myself, so…I took typing (not keyboarding, not in the mid-70s anyways) in 10th grade and fell right back into it when computers became all the rage. I do a respectful 35 wpm…

Adam, creating nonsense words is its own unique art, and I do believe you are a grand master of it. Everything about “Fludy Bortsnip” makes it an amazing set of not-words, from the look to (what I assume is) the pronunciation.

Do they still make students write in cursive on the SATs? I remember before the test you had to write something about promising not to cheat in cursive. I was so slow that by the time I finished writing everyone was looking at me :(.

Curse all of those ours spent in school writing the same stupid cursive letter over and over until you fill an entire page, and do the same with every goddamn letter in the alphabet and whatever other squiggle they throw at you until your wrist burns out.